Summary
Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord reveals itself as the franchise’s take on a crime thriller in “Chapter 1: The Dark Revenge”, with enough solid action to command attention, but the unusual tone and cops-and-robbers format providing the most intrigue.
Maul is an interesting character, even by Star Wars standards. Initially a cool-looking but admittedly one-note evil henchman, he disappeared from the main continuity and was instead rebuilt, literally and personality-wise, in the quieter corners of the canon, primarily in The Clone Wars and Rebels. Sam Witwer took on the voice role and gave him a strange, Shakespearean contour, and he continued to toil away in the margins, amassing an expansive criminal empire known as the Shadow Collective and flitting in and out of the overarching Skywalker Saga events with his own inscrutable motivations.
Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord is connected to the official Shadow of Maul comic book tie-in, which I haven’t read since it’s pretty difficult to keep up with the continuity these days, but Episode 1, “The Dark Revenge”, reveals it to be very much its own, odd thing. A gorgeous-looking animated police procedural with a bit of franchise ephemera stirred in really wasn’t what I was expecting from this, but half an hour in and I’m already totally enamoured by it.
We begin with, essentially, a mission statement. Maul’s ad-hoc band of outlaws, comprising primarily long-time Mandalorian loyalist Rook Kast and a bunch of Zabrak Nightbrother fodder, pull off a heist on the planet Janix, swiping a moveable vault and a bank droid but leaving a fair amount of cash behind, suggesting ulterior motives. Several things are immediately clear here. The animation is excellent, the action is great, and Maul remains a strikingly cool figure, his opening appearance evoking that classic Rogue One Vader hallway scene touched up with Maul’s own theme music.
But it’s arguably things happening away from Maul that are the most interesting here. We’re briefly introduced to what is clearly a former Jedi Padawan, Devon Izara, and her master, Eeko-Dio Daki, both of whom are eking out an existence on Janix after Order 66. There’s little development here, but things to pay attention to all the same: Devon is getting increasingly sick of being poverty-stricken and is flirting with the idea of stealing to survive, while Eeko-Dio is trying to caution her against those kinds of actions. Devon’s arrested for stealing from a fruit cart and bundled into the station’s cells, giving her a front-row seat to a later scene. But in the context of Maul searching for an apprentice… I think we know where this is going.
Most of our knowledge of the opening heist in Maul – Shadow Lord Episode 1 comes from an unlikely source – the police detective, Brander Lawson, who is investigating it alongside his droid partner, 2B0T, aka “Two-Boots”. This introduces the big police-procedural angle of the show, which is immediately the most interesting thing about it. Lawson and Two Boots pore over some security footage of Maul and discover that his background has been classified by the Imperial Security Bureau, but Lawson is hesitant to inform the Empire and have them take over the investigation. Again, I didn’t expect the local police attempting to circumvent totalitarian oversight to be a major theme in this, but here we are.
Maul’s aim is to play two local crime lords against each other. One of them is Nico Deemis, who owned the bank he robbed, and the other is Looti Vario, who betrayed the Shadow Collective. He pulls this off pretty easily by serving the bank droid’s severed, chattering head on a platter during an ostensibly peaceful dinner meeting, and all hell breaks loose. Maul watches from afar as Deemis and Vario’s men kill each other, and as Vario eventually kills Deemis. Maul’s goons move in to finish Vario off, but Lawson and Two-Boots arrive in the nick of time and take him into custody, holding him in a cell that is conveniently opposite Devon Izara’s.
Even at the risk of attracting the Empire’s attention, Maul leads the Collective on a raid of the police station to finish Vario off, which is a great-looking sequence. But more to the point, it leads to the big cliffhanger ending, in which Maul, having taken Vario alive to pump him for more information on the Pyke Syndicate and his other betrayers, notices Devon in the opposite cell. When he opens the door, Devon recognises him immediately and calls him by his name. Perhaps he has just found his new apprentice.
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